The result of having the tube above the altitude axis is that it will not balance at certain altitudes without tightening the altitude clutch, which is a pain. The design is similar to that of a camera tripod, with an alt-azimuth configuration that places the tube on top of the altitude axis – albeit lacking in any kind of handle to move the telescope around. The Voyager 700x76mm has one of the most unusual mounts I have ever seen on a modern telescope. It is amazing that Bushnell failed on this seeing as a decent red-dot finder can now be obtained for under twenty dollars. The included red dot finder is absolute garbage and is hard to get working or aligned at all. Thankfully, none of this matters because an app like SkySafari for your phone or Stellarium for your PC can give you the altitude/azimuth coordinates of anything without having to navigate a keypad to do it.Īside from the fact that in 2019 you can just use an app to get coordinates and information of sky objects, using the setting circles has other challenges we’ll go into momentarily. I think the constellation mode can give you a tour of deep-sky objects, but the whole system is convoluted enough that I haven’t figured out how to use it. For whatever reason, rather than including an actual object catalog the Sky Tour merely enables you to find constellations (why you’d do this with a telescope is beyond me), tells you about mythology (mildly interesting, I suppose), and helps you find the planets (which you really don’t need assistance finding as you can literally see five of the seven observable ones with the naked eye Uranus and Neptune are pretty unremarkable with a 3” telescope anyway). The Voyager comes with a strange “Sky Tour” device that gives you coordinates to find the object of your choice using the scope’s setting circles, as well as a talking voice to tell you interesting facts and information about the objects you select. Strangely enough, Bushnell doesn’t include a cheap Barlow lens or market it on the basis of “power”, so why they put a 4mm Huygens in and didn’t include a low-power eyepiece puzzles me. Additionally, there’s no low-power eyepiece with a focal length of above 20mm, and the 4mm eyepiece provides too much magnification for the telescope to handle. These eyepieces are almost entirely useless, with narrow and aberrated fields of view and tiny lenses. The Voyager 700x76mm comes with three Huygens eyepieces: A 12.5mm (56x), an 8mm (88x) and a 4mm (176x). The last time this was acceptable on a consumer-grade telescope was in the 1960s, with telescopes such as the Edmund Space Conqueror and Super Space Conqueror – and even back then, people complained about how cheap and inconvenient it was! The wingnuts are quite small and easy to use, and prevent one from sliding or rotating the telescope tube to balance it or move the eyepiece to a convenient location additionally, the bolts are annoying to deal with when transporting the scope. The optical tube attaches to the mount via the most simplistic system I have ever seen on a commercial telescope – two wingnuts attaching to bolts through the tube. However, it is all plastic and doesn’t work particularly well. The Voyager 700x76mm does, oddly enough for such a cheaply-made scope, have a 1.25” focuser. The optics in this scope are about the only thing I can really say is good about it everything is just downhill quality-wise from here on. It has a spherical primary mirror, but with a 3” f/9.2 mirror a sphere deviates so slightly from a parabola that it falls well within the tolerances as to what is considered acceptable for a telescope’s primary mirror. The Bushnell Voyager 700x76mm Reflector Telescope is, as the name says, a 76mm (3”) Newtonian reflector with a 700mm focal length, making it f/9.2. The 76mm Newtonian Optical Tube Performance However, the execution of the scope’s design is basically a failure, and the included accessories are among the worst I’ve ever seen. There are definitely some good ideas and commendable features here, and clearly, some work was put into the design. The Bushnell Voyager 700x76mm Reflector Telescope is definitely one of the lesser-quality telescopes I have reviewed, though not the worst.
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